What .Net can offer that Labview cannot? and vice-versa?

[-mbda-]

We are trying to create a test application that supposed to work in every instrument. We are planning to use NI-Visa and C#.net as a development tool but also we are looking at what labview can offer to the application/software that we are trying to build.

I only have a background in microsoft development tools like vb, .net, c so it will be a challenged to work in labview but I want to make sure  that I am maximizing all the tools that is out there.

Thanks in advance.

[Evan P.]

LabVIEW is a development environment that would be utilizing, in your application, the NI-Visa driver. LabVIEW would accomplish this in a graphical, easy to use environment. This NI-Visa driver is also made available in the .NET environment and allows full use of the NI-VISA function calls.

Easily put, the advantage of LabVIEW is its graphical nature that makes abstraction and program organization easy and intuitive.  The actual end functionality will be the same between LabVIEW and any other environment utilizing the NI-Visa driver -- the ease of use from the developer's standpoint is the difference. If you are comfortable in .NET environment and only concerned with the success of your program in the end product for various devices using NI-Visa, you will see no advantage in using a different environment to deploy this driver.